|
Vol. 3, No. 9 - April 23, 2004
| Alumni Invitation Art Exhibition Honors College's Centennial The Tang Teaching Museum announces its first Alumni Invitational exhibition, on view May 1-June 6. Organized in honor of the College's centennial celebration this year, the exhibition is a tribute to the influential legacy of the Skidmore art program. The exhibition will showcase the work of four artists whose Skidmore class years span almost half a century. The artists are photographer Susan Lipper '75, ceramic artist David Dalva '85, and painters Susan Rabinowitz Malloy '45 and Sarah Lutz '89. Their works will be displayed in a large gallery divided into quarters, giving the effect of four solo shows, according to Tang curator Ian Berry. Lipper is a documentary-style photographer, perhaps best known for her book of gritty black-and-white images made in the rural West Virginia town of Grapevine. Her new work, an installation prepared especially for the Tang space, will pair large images evoking surveillance, empty spaces, and 9/11 — even though the photos were made before 2001. Like Lipper's previous works, the new photographs (titled Not Yet Titled) have a narrative quality. Dalva's towering ceramic sculptures stand several feet tall and are suggestive of totem poles. Finished in flashy colors such as shiny metallic gold, the forms nonetheless have a natural look, says Berry: "The marks of the artist's hands are still visible." Dalva explains that he often uses the female body as a starting point, abstracts it, and then "tries to suggest some movement." Sea forms such as coral, snails, and fish inspired another series of pieces. Malloy is a representational painter who "paints a realistic landscape and then abstracts it, much as Mondrian did," says Berry. "She starts with a tree, turns the branches into cubes, and an abstract painting emerges." Malloy explains that her work is "based more on memories of shapes and forms of nature than on actual places I see." Her inspirations include "winter trees and branches, combined with manmade towers and bridges." Lutz's abstract paintings feature "a clear figure/ground relationship," she says. Interested in the play of surface and form, she combines the repetition of a shape-often a round, cell-like ball (as in her last body of work, The Morula Series) — with layers and layers of color. Although her images are invented, "they are evocative of familiar life forms," says Lutz. The Skidmore Alumni Invitational exhibition at the Tang was organized by curator Berry in collaboration with the artists. The exhibition's opening will be celebrated with reception 6-7 p.m. on Thursday, May 6. The reception will be free and open to the public.
Skidmore
Intercom |